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Evaluating Animated Characters: Facial Motion Magnitude Influences Personality Perceptions

Published: 09 February 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Animated characters are expected to fulfill a variety of social roles across different domains. To be successful and effective, these characters must display a wide range of personalities. Designers and animators create characters with appropriate personalities by using their intuition and artistic expertise. Our goal is to provide evidence-based principles for creating social characters. In this article, we describe the results of two experiments that show how exaggerated and damped facial motion magnitude influence impressions of cartoon and more realistic animated characters. In our first experiment, participants watched animated characters that varied in rendering style and facial motion magnitude. The participants then rated the different animated characters on extroversion, warmth, and competence, which are social traits that are relevant for characters used in entertainment, therapy, and education. We found that facial motion magnitude affected these social traits in cartoon and realistic characters differently. Facial motion magnitude affected ratings of cartoon characters’ extroversion and competence more than their warmth. In contrast, facial motion magnitude affected ratings of realistic characters’ extroversion but not their competence nor warmth. We ran a second experiment to extend the results of the first. In the second experiment, we added emotional valence as a variable. We also asked participants to rate the characters on more specific aspects of warmth, such as respectfulness, calmness, and attentiveness. Although the characters’ emotional valence did not affect ratings, we found that facial motion magnitude influenced ratings of the characters’ respectfulness and calmness but not attentiveness. These findings provide a basis for how animators can fine-tune facial motion to control perceptions of animated characters’ personalities.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Applied Perception
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception  Volume 13, Issue 2
March 2016
90 pages
ISSN:1544-3558
EISSN:1544-3965
DOI:10.1145/2888406
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 09 February 2016
Accepted: 01 November 2015
Revised: 01 October 2015
Received: 01 October 2014
Published in TAP Volume 13, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Facial motion
  2. animation
  3. personality perception
  4. rendering style

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  • Research
  • Refereed

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  • Disney Research
  • Eunice Kennedy Shriver Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health

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  • (2024)Personality Expression Using Co-Speech GestureACM Transactions on Applied Perception10.1145/369490522:2(1-20)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2024
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